That's a perfect picture. I don't know what else to say about it, but I really would like to visit Colorado now. What a cool place to get married!

I'm not surprised that Crack Emcee found other people 'beat him to it'. I went to his blog (with adblock turned on... don't want to pay him for trolling), and found that every single one of his posts was a lazy little rip off of another blog's work. 'Here's that picture I saw on instapundit!... here's that youtube link I saw on althouse!!!!'

Seems like Crack Emcee is the place to go to be reminded of all the stuff you saw yesterday. What's interesting is that he begs for donations in every single post. He'll put up a picture he didn't make, and add nothing at all to the blog post except a donation request. Seems kinda greedy to me.

Wish i was there right now. Colorado is so great to just kick back and relax in. My wife and I were in Colorado Springs last August for a week and stayed at the Pikes Peak Paradise Bed and Breakfast and it was fantastic. The owners Ron and Michael were just phenomenal and they made staying there a pleasure. I'd like to go back there again and do more stuff. So much fun and I adopted Michael as my brother. :D

Do you know what flat pisses me off, and makes me happy at the same time?

I was up late last night doing a workbook I picked up, deciphering inscriptions on obelisks. I get to the end, an extra section that isn't scored so it's really not at all important, where partial glyphs are presented that are nearly destroyed. Make that thoroughly destroyed. The first one, 1/3 displayed, isn't that bad because the parts that show are distinctive and the possibilities few, although the professor failed to draw an essential element in the portion of the final glyph that displayed that would have distinguished it from other likely and probable possibilities. Even though in the solution he does supply the completed version of the displayed portion that does distinguish it along with the missing portion naturally, of course.

I got the solution right, so I have no righteous complaint here but in my view that carelessness makes the whole thing unfair. All the glyphs are hand-drawn, not photographs.

The second extra test is totally ridiculous. Nothing but a line of faint chicken scratches that frankly could have been anything. I could have completed them any number of ways to say a whole range of likely formulaic things. Why he even bothered or thought that would be a valid test is beyond me. I skipped it and looked at the solution. Then got really pissed off at what was expected to be reconstructed. But here's the thing that makes me want to smack the professor across the head with his own workbook. His translation of the reconstructed text is flatly wrong. Not just in interpretation, he misses entire segments of what the glyphs are actually depicting, and he declares it saying things that are clearly absent.

So there's that.

Here's the thing that makes me disrespect the person: On the solution page he states if your score was below a "C" , I didn't bother scoring because I'm doing this for fun but I would have scored high without even without that ridiculous extra portion, then you might want to consider dropping the course at this point and pick it up again later if it still suits you.

!!!!¡¡¡???¿¿¿!!!!

What a perfectly arrogant bastardly thing to say bright-eyed cheery enthusiastic young person -- to project the onus of his own shortcomings in presentation, careless glyphic handwriting, poor samples, cheap printing and such, onto the student!

* bangs head on table *

The thing that makes me delighted though is he's not my professor and I don't have to put up with that crap, nor suffer suppressed grades because of his ego and shortcomings as teacher.

Chip A...in what sort of class would such a workbook be used or assigned?

There is a parabolic quality to your story that encourages more disciphering. I enjoyed what was written as story, parable, and description of the personal solution and resolution processes involved with learning.

Chip,I like my obelisks uninscripted for just that reason. I mean you just don't have time to decipher as you drive by em. I can do it at maybe 55 mph, but who wants to drive that slow just to figure out it says "Drink your Ovaltine."

A language class. Dead language, specifically. I'm talking about this workbook, Oddly, widely available online but with no image available that I could find. It is old and out of print, outdated, error-stricken, superseded by better works, brief at just over 50 pages, but it is fun as hell as a puzzle book and totally worth it. The tests inside are sealed so you must break the perforations, and that strikes me as rather cute. Cheaply printed, the glyphs are poorly drawn and poorly reproduced, in short, the workbook is charming.

2.) Makes me mad because professor suggests to students that do poorly to consider giving up without questioning their performance might be due to his own obvious errors and poor presentation.

3.) I glee that I'm no longer beholden to that sort of egoistic crap and have learned to learn on my own free of the shackles, the limitations, the expense, and the aggravation of Academialand, and I'm actually grateful such things are available.

One time I was taking a class on Shannon Information Theory and the professor was copying equations directly out of the textbook onto the board in a droning monotone that would have made Ben Stein sound dynamic. Then he got to a point where he was saying something like "and then it is obvious that ..." as he wrote the next equation. And he stopped short. Staring at the board he asked himself the question "Now why is that obvious"? And he spent the last twenty minutes of class staring at the board and stroking his chin while those of us in the class sat there wishing we were anyplace else.

Next class session he came in and said, "Yes, it's obvious." And on he went from there.